The DEA Is Hiring Weed Couriers

Published on February 17, 2017, By Tom Angell

The federal government is looking to hire teams of professionals to transport “Bulk Marijuana and Other Hazardous Waste Materials,” according to a solicitation notice posted this week.

The work will mostly take place in Houston, El Paso and Phoenix, where the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) says agents seize “enormous amounts of marijuana each year” largely as a result of referrals from the U.S. Border Patrol.

DEA needs help moving the contraband from the Mexican border to its field offices for testing and processing in support of criminal trials.

The new filing is a re-up of a notice first put out last year which says that DEA agents currently “drive hundreds of miles each day to pick up loads of bulk marijuana.”

The trips “involve large loads of bulk drugs, requiring five to eight Agents participating in each trip and consuming an entire work day.”

Now DEA wants to source the cannabis transportation out to teams of private contractors so that work hours for the feds themselves can “be spent in a much more productive and efficient manner, namely pursuing major drug trafficking organizations.”

The contractors need to be U.S. citizens aged 21 or older and have a high school diploma or GED. They must also have military, National Guard, law enforcement or security experience and not have any previous arrests or convictions. And they need to meet a series of physical and medical requirements to do the job, which mostly consists of “load[ing] and unload[ing] large amounts of pre-packed bulk marijuana,” which is reported to be in bales weighing “an average of 20 to 60 pounds each.”

Finally, they must be licensed to carry firearms, and DEA is pretty specific about the kinds of guns it wants to see contractors using on the job:

Remington model 870, 12 gauge, pump-action, single barrel non-ported shotgun with a barrel length of 14 to 20 inches long and overall length not less than 26 inches. The shotgun must be equipped with either a fixed stock or a folding stock that can be extended to allow the weapon to be fired from the shoulder.

Tom Angell

Tom Angell is a senior political correspondent for MassRoots. A 15-year veteran in the cannabis law reform movement, he covers the policy and politics of marijuana. Separately, he serves as chairman of the nonprofit Marijuana Majority and is editor of the daily Marijuana Moment newsletter.